Where on the Egean shore, a city stands,

Built nobly. Pure the air and light the soil-
Athens, the eye of Greece.

OUR city is not on the Egean shore, nor is it very nobly built, whatever the promise of future prospects may be ; but the site is not less noble than that of Athens, the air is as pure, the soil as light, and it may truly be entitled, without disparagement to any other worthy sister, the very eye of the South. This caption, therefore, that we have employed, and which might seem, under other circumstances, a narrow and circumscribed one, will, we trust, commend what we have to say to all classes of our readers, wherever our Magazine may reach them, whether on the banks of the Congaree, the rolling Chatahoochie, or the sinuous and turbid Mississippi. They will all, we are sure, present and remote, be pleased to learn from us, that our-may we not say their ?*—venerable city has at length awakened from her long slumbers, and is about to take a proper and becoming attitude among her neighbors. There is evidently a stir-from what cause we pretend not to say-among all classes of our people. Men are springing up, as if from a long sleep, surprised to find their armor grown rusty, mortified at the shame and exposure, and seemingly determined to burnish it up afresh, and take to their standards with vigor and resolve. Old things are

And is not Charleston the maternal city of the South, from Hatteras to the Bay of Biloxi-the frontier city, for many lustres, of the Anglo-American settlements, which gave character to all that region, and concentrated within herself the hard won glories of its early history. She supplied the resources; led the enterprises, furnished the mind, and freely gave her sons, year after year, and war after war, to the whole South, for several hundred miles around her. Her volunteers were always ready for the help of her sisters, whether it were North-Carolina or Georgia, that stood in danger from the savages, from the no less savage Spaniards that armed them, the French, and the Cubans. The history of Charleston alone, her en. terprises, her wars, her defeats and victories, would be a most interesting history; and would be read with pride, as the history of a parent stock, to the remotest regions of the great South-Western Valley. Why should it not be written?